Revisiting My 2019 Reading List

[osprey_archer]

I haven’t quite finished the 2017 books yet, but I had some extra time at work Friday and what better use of that time than to go through my 2019 reading list and decide which authors to revisit? So here we are.


Katherine Applegate - Pocket Bear

Grace Lin - Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods

Shaun Tan - The Arrival. I read Tales of the City in 2019 and found it pretty downbeat, but littlerhymes clued me in that Tan also wrote picture books so of course I have to give those a try.

C. S. Lewis - considering The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, although I’m also interested in Studies in Words

Toni Morrison - Beloved

Ben MacIntyre - Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy

Lisa See - Daughters of the Sun and Moon. Her newest book! Not yet out, in fact.

Jacqueline Woodson

Penelope Farmer - Soumchi. Apparently Farmer moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. (the university library has Eve: Her Story, but also a book called Soumchi which appears to be written by an Israeli writer named Amos Oz, but nonetheless has Farmer’s name attached in the catalog. Did she translate? Or write the preface? May check it out just to solve the mystery.)

Dorothy Gilman

George Gissing - Demos. After New Grub Street, I felt I had to explore Gissing further, and according to Wikipedia, George Orwell thought Demos was one of Gissing’s best novels.

E. M. Delafield - The Provincial Lady in Wartime

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

Vivien Alcock - A Kind of Thief. I found this book at a used bookstore so it has become my next Alcock

William Dean Howells - Their Wedding Journey

Booth Tarkington - Penrod. I’ve meant to explore more Booth Tarkington since I read Seventeen. At last I’m getting around to it!

Barbara Cooney - Letting Swift River Go. When I visited asakiyume we went to the Quabbin on a foggy day, and asakiyume mentioned that Cooney illustrated a book about the building of the Quabbin, so of course that's next on my list.

Susan Cooper - torn between Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children and Green Boy

William Bowen - Merrimeg. Bowen was a children’s fantasy author in the 1920s. I’d really like to read his book The Enchanted Forest, but it doesn’t appear to be on Gutenberg or FadedPage, so I’ll content myself with Merrimeg for now.

Comments

[lobelia321]

Oh I like this. Also I adore Shaun Tan. I might revisit a past year (possibly 2016? a decade ago?) and choose a couple of authors, either to reread or to read other books by them. Or marvel at the poor shrivelled thing my reading was pre-2017.

[osprey_archer]

I'm looking forward to giving Shaun Tan another try. I loved the illustrations in the first book of his that I read, but not so much the short stories, so a picture book sounds like a good thing to try.

Did you have a reading renaissance in 2017?

[lobelia321]

I did have a reading renaissance in 2017! And it's ongoing. I was turbocharged by 1) starting a disc-bound bullet journal (still my daily bible) and 2) drowning head-first in Goodreads challenges, paramount then (since discontinued) the Women Reading challenge. I love a challenge. And these days I do about four concurrently (at least). And on the tailcoats of these twain, I fell into cheap e-book deals and online freebies and just embraced the eclectic reader that had always been lurking inside my former rather lit-ficcy snooty self. Last year, I finished 236 books which is ridiculous. I've kept stats since the late 1980s and I was always 40-80 books and fancied myself a prolific reader. But also the book scene has changed completely. Bookstagram, Goodreads, Storygraph, podcasts -- they all make it much easier to stumble across recs and to curate one's reading. I remember in the early 2000s wanting to read books from across the globe. It was impossible to find anything that had not won a Nobel prize or was untranslated. Today: I am having so much fun assembling lists and sub-lists. Back then, I had to rely on physical bookstores to provide something I could stumble upon serendipitously, without recommendation or 'read a sample' or 'if you like this, you might like this' or reliable other readers' favourites. So basically I could only rely on publishers paying bookstores to put books on tables or flag them up somehow, or on haphazardly finding books that happened to be in some library shelf.

[lobelia321]

And then, if I should find an author I liked: how to get their other books if they weren't in the bookshop? Or out of print??? Potluck in one's local second hand bookstore.

[grrlpup]

oh yay! This reminded me there are a couple of Jean Little books at my public library that I haven't gotten to yet. :)

[osprey_archer]

Always fun to check out more books by a favorite author!

[asakiyume]

Your post prompted me to watch this video, because even though I knew about Letting Swift River Go, I'd never read it myself. ... When it got to the part with all the trees cleared away, I was reminded of photos in our post office: the valley with houses in it, the valley denuded like that, and then the Quabbin as it is today.

[osprey_archer]

I should read that particular book soon, while I've still got out visit to the Quabbin fresh in my mind, with the mist on the ice... It would be very Fog Magic if you could walk onto the misty ice and back in time to the villages that were there before.

[lucymonster]

Ben Macintyre is good fun! I haven’t read Agent Sonya, but I very much enjoyed Agent Zigzag.

[osprey_archer]

I've been meaning to read Agent Zigzag too! Why has that man written so many interesting books? Very unfair really.

[blotthis]

oh this is such a cool idea!!!

[osprey_archer]

I've been enjoying it! It's been especially useful for pushing me to read more books by authors where I read one book and was like "Oh I must read more by this person" and then did not.

However, it's perhaps less helpful for authors like Daphne Du Maurier where I previously averaged about one book a year, which means that they're showing up on these reading lists again and again and again... which turns out to be too much. One book a year was the right amount! So I may need to decide whether to include Du Maurier et al in any given list based on vibes.

[blotthis]

wait, oh my god, are you then reading the books you pull IMMEDIATELY? your power

i don't read more than one book in a row by any author anymore, because noticing their tics makes me extra-twitchy, and it's just not fair... closest i've come recently was reading the sawyers harriets over several months, and doing about one dwj a month as i putter along horribly behind 8 days...

i've only actually ever read du maurier's Rebecca, but it's one of my favorite books ever. what are your favorites?

[osprey_archer]

Well, not exactly immediately. I still have three books left on the 2016 list and *mumblecough* 21 on the 2017 list, so it will be... probably a few months before I get to 2019 as a whole. I did the list a bit early because the Vivien Alcock is burning a hole on my to-read shelf and also Letting Swift River Go is topical.

Re: noticing author's tics if you read to many in a row, this only bothers me for some authors. I once read three Margaret Atwoods in a year and that was a mistake. But I also read the entire Gerald Morris ten-book Camelot series in about a week while recovering from an injury and spent much of it fondly going "Ah yes, Gerald Morris thinks courtly love is so stupid, love that for him."

Re: Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel are the god tier, A++ no notes absolutely brilliant. Her short stories are generally worth reading. Didn't care for The Flight of the Falcon. Didn't finish The Loving Spirit. Jamaica Inn is super atmospheric but the love interest is an asshole and not in a "wow, you suck but I want to study you like a bug" way a la Maxim. skygiants has been after me to read The Scapegoat, but I haven't yet.

Have never written proper reviews of My Cousin Rachel or Rebecca. Should get around to it someday.